Ko Te Whenua Te Utu Land is the Price: Essays on Maori History, Land and Politics

There are essentially two histories of Aotearoa. First, a long Maori history and secondly a history of Pakeha colonisation and take-over of Aotearoa. The two histories have been repeatedly stitched together . . . . For more than half a century, Keith Sorrenson – one of New Zealand’s leading historians and himself of mixed Maori and Pakeha descent – has dived deeper than anyone into the story of two peoples in New Zealand. In this new book, Sorrenson brings together his major writing from the last 56 years into a powerful whole – covering topics from the origins of Maori (and Pakeha ideas about those origins), through land purchases and the King Movement of the nineteenth century, and on to twentieth-century politics and the new history of the Waitangi Tribunal. Throughout his career, Sorrenson has been concerned with the international context for New Zealand history while also attempting to understand and explain Maori conceptions and Pakeha ideas from the inside. And he has been determined to tell the real story of Maori losses of land and their political responses as, in the face of Pakeha colonisation, they became a minority in their own country. Ko te Whenua te Utu / Land is the Price is a powerful history of Maori and Pakeha in New Zealand.

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M. P. K. Sorrenson (Ngati Pukenga, Pakeha) is one of New Zealand’s most important living historians. He began as a junior lecturer in the University of Auckland history department in 1958, and completed a DPhil at Oxford and further research in East Africa, before returning to Auckland in 1964. He taught there for the next 31 years. He was president of CARE in the 1970s, sat on the council of the New Zealand Historic Places Trust for a decade and was a leading member of the Waitangi Tribunal for 25 years. He is author or editor of numerous books on African and New Zealand history, including Maori Origins and Migrations: The Genesis of some Pakeha Myths and Legends (AUP/OUP, 1979) and the three-volume work Na To Hoa Aroha, From Your Dear Friend: The Correspondence between Sir Apirana Ngata and Sir Peter Buck, 1925–1950 (AUP, 1986, 1987, 1988), both of which have just been launched as ebooks by Auckland University Press.